America: At the Crossroads of Fate and Destiny

History offers us very few pivotal opportunities to intercede in the disintegrating fate of a nation and to once again animate its destiny. We stand now at such a momentous crossroads, and it is up to all of us to handle this moment and the delicate power that is presently rushing through our collective spirit with a heightened awareness that we are setting great consequences in motion. It has fallen upon the shoulders of President Obama and this Congress to make decisions bold enough to reanimate America's destiny. And along with Obama and this Congress, we are the generation of Americans to whom the task has been given to renew the Founding Fathers' vision of liberty, humanism, and a devotion to equality of law, or we shall be the generation remembered for having let this vision perish. Such is the power of standing at the crossroads of fate and destiny.

It is a privilege to be alive at a time when history calls us to a position of great awakening and maturity of action. Like the climate that spawned the American Revolution or gave this nation the stamina to hold itself together through the shattering of a devastating Civil War, crossroads of fate and destiny demand that individuals respond to their nation as they never have before, as if the nation itself was calling to them for aid. But such a privilege comes with responsibilities. We must pause and assess this path America is on and not from through the typical political lens of Republican versus Democrat. Rather, the force of destiny demands courageous leadership and choices that are bold, often forging new pathways that must be taken because the old ways have ceased to be productive. When individuals come to a crossroads of fate and destiny in their own life, it is an opportunity to start again, but that new beginning cannot look like the life they are leaving behind. They must relinquish patterns of behavior that have become dysfunctional. The shedding of the old patterns is painful, make no mistake. There is nothing simple, easy, or comfortable about arriving at these crossroads of life. They are indeed symbolic roads of crucifixion. And yet they are also inevitable. No road in life, not the road of a nation or of an individual, is a smooth and direct path.

As I watched President Obama address the joint session of Congress, detailing his vision of health care coverage for all Americans, I also saw him as someone confronting the forces of fate and destiny. I imagined this Congress standing alongside him on this cosmic power point, not capable of ever realizing that their actions, cleverly disguised as the business of politics, were actually having an intensified field effect upon the psyche of this nation. This is the moment that history has chosen for us to address this question: Shall we shift our direction from the fearful and divisive path we have been walking on for almost a decade or shall we come together again as one nation and envision a new future? Such a decision is of cosmic proportions though such questions generally are disguised within an issue that brings up great controversy within the populace. But such controversy and bubbling outrage that comes to the surface over any one issue -- in this case it's health care -- is not really fully about health care. The health care issue is actually the straw on the camel's back.

The truth is this epidemic of outrage is rooted in the fact that at our instinctual level, we know our nation is changing -- not because of the policies of President Obama, or even because of the many blunders of all the previous administrations. Our nation is changing because the times we live in call for dramatic shifts in our way of life, and though we would love to return to the golden years of post World War II and Happy Days and Donna Reed and Disneyland, and the myth that we are entitled to earn more than are parents just because we are Americans, what we are now experiencing is the shattering of that myth -- and it hurts. Health care, symbolically translated, "Who is going to care for me?", just happens to be the perfect issue to shatter the myth that we will always have everything we want because we are entitled to it.

But that shattering is not the fault of the Republicans or the Democrats. It's just time for that myth to shatter because it can no longer be sustained by momentum of our own economics and the evolution of where we fit in with the rest of the world. We now have to readjust ourselves, our economics, our politics, our sense of who we are, what we need -- not what we think we are entitled to -- but what we need, according to an organic global scale and not an ego-fear driven scale that constantly tells us that if we do not dominate everything and everyone, we are doomed to starve. It is the timing of history and the pressure of global and environmental changes that we cannot control that are now calling the shots, changes so vast and powerful that we have yet to even notice them. To squeeze just a sample of what I am referring to into this article, consider the dynamic force of "change" itself.

We have an inherent fear of change. We don't like change to surprise us and thus we have devised means, useless as they are in the long run, to ward off random visitations of unscheduled upheavals. We hold tight to the illusion that money, status, and positioning oneself to control others -- all the entitlements of politicians, for example -- actually have the authority to command the laws of nature. Thus the thinking in the ordinary mind is, "Given enough money, I can control enough people (or enough countries) and make them yield to certain decisions, thus preventing other things from happening. Why, I can even stop evolution from happening." Or so the Republicans along with the Blue Dog Democrats believe, as evidenced by the way they conduct themselves when asked for solutions instead of critical feedback. They rely upon spin and arrogance as the most sophisticated tools, both of which are admissions that they have no ideas whatsoever.

In truth, we have entered a new era of change itself and that alone has brought us to these crossroads. We are now living in a world in which all change is of universal proportions, affecting all nations of this world in some way with a speed never before experienced. And that "speed of intimacy" will only increase in the years to come. The forces of change are also felt immediately by the masses of humanity. Epidemics travel by planes, terrorism can strike anywhere at any time, the markets in one country shift our wealth while we sleep in this country. The nature of change as it now exists has disintegrated all familiar boundaries. And thus we must now think of all change as having ascended to the status of "profound". The significance of the choices we make as a nation and as individuals in support of our nation -- or opposed to it -- will matter more at this time than can be measured. We are energetically linked to the global community, moving our thoughts around this planet to hundreds if not thousands of people in seconds. This power of the Internet, as it is referred to, is new to our world and it is a profound power, not a casual one, as it holds the potential of contributing great truth or great lies without being held personally responsible for either initiating these actions or their consequences. Yet, such actions have consequences, as we are now witnessing in the response to the lies manufactured about death panels, for example.

In our collective intuitive gut, we know we are standing at the precipice of great change and in keeping with this new era of energy we are in, these changes are indeed happening at light speed. We don't want the familiar, cozy, wonderful parts of the American lifestyle to come under scrutiny, but the fact is that is exactly what is happening. Again, this is not the result of the policies of the Republicans or Democrats. It's simply what happens at the end of a cycle and we have come to the end of a cycle of American history. What we as well as our politicians are responsible for, however, is how well we negotiate this moment in time. What we must hold them accountable for is the management of their pride, their arrogance, their lies, their decisions not to participate in a bi-partisan government and to continue the blood bath politics so cleverly crafted by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, and to sabotage all the efforts of President Obama to forge a new path out of a burning forest. And shall we even mention that their collective arrogance and rage has reached such a low level that Republican Congressman Joe Wilson actually screamed, "You lie" during Obama's speech?

If we look carefully at the behavior of the Republican clan, however, it is not difficult to see through their foggy brains and well-rehearsed behavior. People or individuals who rely upon arrogant and sarcastic behavior and opinions as weapons of mass destruction do so because they are frightened, confused, and lack any sense of how to lead the nation themselves. Truth be told, they are probably relieved as birds out of a cage that they are not in charge of the White House this session. Why? Because they know that the American tradition -- and it's not a good one -- is to forget who made the mess we're in and blame the present administration for not fixing things within the first six months of the new term. They knew all along that if McCain and Lipstick-Palin didn't get in, they could continue to play their Karl Rovian tactics and sabotage good people along with any plans that challenged corporate wallets. It actually works in their favor to have Obama take the hits for the cowardice with which they managed this country during the last administration (and this time I am referring to the Bush administration, the wars in the Middle East, the huge debt Obama inherited, Wall Street policies, subprime mortgages, etc).

As a result of these last years under Rove and Cheney, the Republicans have become very clever at anger management -- by that I mean managing the anger of Americans. Repression and threats of anti-patriotism were their most effective methods of controlling the anger of the American public. Now that Americans do not feel as frightened to speak out, pent up anger that is years old is pouring out and Republicans are using that anger, as cleverly and effectively as Goebbels did under Hitler. They want to scare their own nation and keep them scared. They want to continue to build hatred just as Goebbels did. The health care issue is a perfect artery for all this anger, but all this anger is not about this health care issue. Make no mistake about that. It's about having been betrayed by their own government so blatantly for eight years. No wonder Americans are finding it so easy to turn on Obama.

In such a tumultuous climate, is it any wonder that we must stand at these crossroads of America's fate and destiny with a genuine realization that we are really standing at these crossroads? True, history itself has brought us to this moment in time, but it is up to us to handle this moment, to breathe our choices into this moment. We cannot go backwards. We cannot return to an America who dominated the world with its wealth and military power and its might. We have been humbled, like it or not. Our soldiers are exhausted -- bless their souls -- and our bank account is busted. Unemployment is sky high and our debt has never been higher. The only way to go now is forwards.

And we can do this. If you know anything about the American spirit at all, you know that it finds defeat mighty distasteful. It's much more likely that if you give the American spirit some inspiration, some hope, some encouragement to go forward with pioneering new ideas, it will not fail. Or give America another nation who relies on us for food. We can once again respond to the world with food production. We are a limitless people with a limitless capacity to create, to serve, and to share. We can and we must reanimate the destiny of America because it is in its purest form a destiny of humanism, of liberty, and of free thought. We cannot lose those values. We must not lose them. But most of all, we must not lose sight of the fact that beyond these Republicans and Democrats who are temporarily in office, we are permanently Americans. Any politician who uses his office to foster hatred of a fellow American is committing a form of treason against the fabric of this nation's well being. Such politicians are unfit to be role models for what good American citizens truly are. We must not model our politics on theirs for theirs are tainted with private agendas filled with greed, ambition, and personal gain. We must keep our loyalties focused where they belong -- upon the vision of this nation and not a misguided loyalty to a contaminated political party that fosters hatred of a fellow American.

President Obama is certainly not perfect. But he is a man of vision whose desire to serve this nation is sincere and does not come from the entitlement of wounds. And he is the man that history has placed at the crossroads of fate and destiny at this time. It is not surprising that such a man would experience great storms and strong winds. Only those with the strongest of spirits can work alongside the forces of change that sweep through a nation.